X-Message-Number: 25601
Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 07:54:38 -0500
From: Thomas Donaldson <>
Subject: CryoNet #25589 - #25600

For Robin Hellwig-Larsen:

A truly excellent and contemporary book on insect societies (which 
includes bees, ants, termites, and all the others) which I would
recommend not only to you but to any cryonicist interested in
reading about matters which don't directly apply to cryonics,
nanotechnology, etc, is Edward O Wilson, THE INSECT SOCIETIES.
Since it was written much later than Maeterlinck, it goes much
more deeply into such societies, how they work (they can all
be different and are different), how they evolved, how the members
act and the society itself acts, and lots of other questions.
Such societies often have different castes, for instance;
Wilson discusses the  use of linear programming to optimize
the % of each caste. 

For RBR:

I will try to be very simple here. To define something such as
continuity does not by itself bring it into existence. We use
words to describe the world, and definitions have to be part of
any theory about the world so that we all know just what 
we're talking about. The word "vertebrate" was defined because
many people noticed lots of animal forms that had backbones:
fish, birds, reptiles, mammals, and it's useful to talk about
that particular anatomical feature. If we lived in a world
totally without continuity (imagine such a world) then the
notion of continuity would be useless to us.

You basically for no good reason you have been able to justify
(other than dogmatism) have assumed that our QEs must have a
continuous existence in time. I have claimed, and so have others
on Cryonet, that we might have long gaps in our existence,
and still continue to have the same QE, as long as the state of our QE
at the end of one period of existence matched our QE at the start
of the next period of existence. To state this claim briefly,
I used a different notion of continuity.

In case your mathematics never went beyond multiplication tables,
I will tell you that we can have and actually use many different
definitions of continuity to fit our attempts to understand
the world. You can say that matter is or is not continuous, 
depending on just how you define continuity. If we're discussing
atomic physics or crystals, we use a different definition of
continuity for matter than if we are doing celestial mechanics.
This hardly means that continuous matter suddenly becomes 
discontinuous when we want to think about it in another way.

As for the message I put on Cryonet that caused your eruption of
feeling, it wasn't even meant for you. It was meant for Mike
Perry, as should be clear from the message itself. Interruption
isn't normally considered polite. 

           Best wishes and long long life to all,

                 Thomas Donaldson

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